Twinkies, Wonderbread, and Mummies

Death of a Cupcake

There was nothing like Hostess products elsewhere in the world – and the world had reason to be grateful. Spongy, airy, loaded with vegetable shortening, high-fructose corn syrup and various polysyllabic lab-concocted preservatives, they included Twinkies, which you could eat six months after you bought them, and Wonder Bread, a slice of which could be rolled in a schoolboy’s palms into a soggy, throwable sphere the size of a grape. When ITT sold Continental Baking (as Hostess was then called) to Ralston Purina, the dog food company, in 1984, it would not have been improper to speak of synergies.